Exploring “Frame time” measurement – Part 3 – the GTX 680 versus the HD 7970 GHz Edition

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 is a survival horror third-person shooter developed and published by Capcom that has become the best selling single title in the series. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil series and it was released for Windows in September 2009. Resident Evil 5 revolves around two investigators pulled into a bio-terrorist threat in a fictional town in Africa.

The developer’s emphasis is in optimizing high frame rates but they have implemented HDR, tone mapping, depth of field and motion blur into the game. Re5’s custom game engine, ‘MT Framework’, already supports DX10 to benefit from less memory usage and faster loading. Resident Evil 5 gives you choice as to DX10 or DX9 and we ran the DX10 pathway.

There are two benchmarks built-into Resident Evil 5. We chose the variable benchmark this time.  It is longer than the fixed benchmark that we ran in Parts 1 and 2 and it is more of a test of the graphics subsystem rather than the CPU.  The benchmark is halted at 3000 frames which is over two and one-half minutes.

Here is the benchmark’s variable test run on the GTX 680 with an average of 167.2 fps:

We now see nearly the same score using the HD 7970 at GHz edition speeds – slightly faster at 168.3 fps.

Now lets’s look at the frame time chart for the GTX 680.

Now check out the frame time chart for the HD 7970 GHz edition:

Now the GTX 680 rank:

Now we see the HD 7970 ranking.

• Average time: Average time across the entire run
• 1% time: Time it takes to draw 99% of frames
• 0.1%: Time it takes to draw 99.9% of frames

There are more spikes with the GTX 680 although the apparent framerate appears to be nearly the same.  The reason jitter is not so apparent in this benchmark is because most of the spikes occur below 16.7ms.  Let’s move on to the STALKER, Call of Pripyat benchmark.